amas claims that the jihadist bombing that killed and
wounded over 50 civilians in Tel Aviv on September 19 was carried out by
its Izzedine al-Qassem Brigades.

Two years ago, an
alliance was forged between Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and
Hamas that resulted in the freeing of their convicted terrorists. This
tacit alliance still exists, and could prove fatal for the future of both
the Palestinian Authority and the "peace process."

The 1988 Hamas
charter (an acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement" in Arabic) is both
political and genocidal  yet the United Nations has never denounced it.
It claims to be a wing of the International Muslim Brotherhood, an
organization founded in Egypt in 1922. Hamas is against any Middle
East peace process: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question
except through jihad. All initiatives, proposals, and international
conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors" (Article 13).

And then there is the
Hamas slogan, which has inspired countless jihadist bombers: "Allah is its
goal, The Prophet its model, the Qur'an its Charter, jihad its
path, and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief" (Article
8).

Hamas is committed to
continuing jihad against "the Jews" until Allah's victory is
implemented. The land of Palestine, it affirms, must be cleansed from
their impurity and viciousness. Muslims are obligated by order of the
Prophet to fight and kill the Jews wherever they find them. This call to
genocide is justified by a hadith which concludes article 7 of the
charter:

The Islamic
Resistance Movement aspires to implement Allah's promise, whatever time
that may take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has
said: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until the Muslims will
fight the Jews (and kill them), until the Jews hide behind rocks and
trees, which will cry: Oh Muslim! Oh Abdullah!, there is a Jew behind
me, come on and kill him. Only the Gharqad tree would not do that
because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

This controversial
hadith  related by the eminent compiler al-Bukhari in the 9th
century  has since become a commonplace belief among Islamists. For
example: On April 12, 2002, the Palestinian Authority's Sheikh Ibrahim
Madhi delivered a Friday sermon at the Sheikh Ijlin Mosque in Gaza City,
broadcast live on Palestinian Authority television. Madhi quoted from this
hadith  including the curious reference to the "Jewish" Gharqad
tree  and then stated: "We believe in this hadith. We are
convinced also that this hadith heralds the spread of Islam and its
rule over all the lands... 'from the ocean to the ocean...'"

Sheikh
Madhi concluded his sermon with: "Oh Allah, accept our martyrs in the
highest heaven... Oh Allah, show the Jews a black day... Oh Allah,
annihilate the Jews and their supporters... Oh Allah, raise the flag of
Jihad across the land... Oh Allah, forgive our sins..." (Credit to <a
href=www.memri.org>MEMRI</a> for the translation.)

Another
characteristic of the Hamas charter is the frequent references it makes to
conspiracy theories, in order that adepts might better understand events
in the dar al-harb (region of war), as distinct from the dar
al-Islam (region of Islam). On "Jews" and "Zionists"  called "the
enemies"  the charter follows in Hitler's footsteps by appealing to the
crudest of forgeries (rightly called a Warrant for Genocide by
Norman Cohn): "Their plan is embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion ... The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists
aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates..." Article 22 states that
"the enemies" have long since taken over the world's financial centers,
controlling the world's media: "agencies, press, broadcasting,
publications, etc.... With their money they formed secret societies, such
as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of
the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist
interests." Indeed, "they" have been stirring up revolutions since the one
in France in 1789  including Communist revolutions.

This fixation
continues:

They were behind
World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate,
making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the
Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they
could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they
made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for
the establishment of their state. It was they that instigated the
replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the
Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is
no war going on anywhere, without them having their finger in
it.

Unlike speeches and
newspaper articles, which may change with the winds, a written charter is
an essential, binding document. Hitler understood this when he wrote in
the preface to Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"): "The unity and
uniformity of a doctrine can only be safeguarded if it has been fixed
forever in a written text." After his release from an Israeli prison and
return to Gaza in October 1997, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and
spiritual head of Hamas, declared that Israel must "disappear from the
map." He added: "We have an aim and an enemy, and we shall continue our
jihad against the enemy. A nation without a jihad is a
nation without a purpose." The root meaning of jihad means
"struggle."

After the first
female jihadist bombing, by 28-year-old Wafa Idris on January 27, 2002,
Sheikh Yassin insisted that women were not needed as "martyr" bombers
because there were plenty of male candidates. He further suggested that a
female combatant, or a candidate for martyrdom, should be accompanied by a
man  either her husband, or a member of her family  if the task required
that she be absent for longer than a day and a night.

In December 1998, in
the presence of President Clinton (who came to Gaza to attend the event),
the PLO's national charter was amended at a special session of its
national congress. Should the Palestinian Authority continue its alliance
with Hamas  and if Hamas refuses to scrap its genocidal charter and
renounce the ideology of jihad-war  there can be no possibility of
serious progress toward a Middle East peace, with two states coexisting
side by side.

There are voices of
reason in the Middle East working for secular goals to be achieved through
compromise and cooperation. It will be hard enough to strive for the
creation of stable, democratic states in the Middle East even without
widespread conspiracy theories and the Hamas genocidal charter  a charter
denounced neither by Muslim spiritual and political leaders nor by the
United Nations. David G. Littman is a
historian and an NGO representative of the Association for World Education
to the United Nations in Geneva, where he has been active on many
human-rights issues since 1986.